DSC Books: Seven Days: A Journey Into Awareness - Days One to Three

Day One continued (Section 2)

Barbara: After some time working with Aaron, learning to find more acceptance of my own emotions, my own thoughts, he asked me to bring that out into the world, to begin to see that in the same way I was judging certain thoughts or emotions in myself as good or bad and clamping down on them, thinking I had to get rid of them, or fix them, in just that way I was also relating to outside experience, such as somebody else’s anger or uncomfortable opinion. It was something to judge, control or fix. We can also have spaciousness around all of these outside circumstances.

Aaron began to ask me a wonderful question about things that were disturbing me, “Is it coming in to bother you, or are you going out to bother it?” As very simple example of how that question works, if we’re sitting here meditating and they start to mow the lawn out there, we would hear a lawn mower. We want it to be quiet. The mind thinks, “That lawn mower is disturbing. How can I meditate with a lawn mower?” The lawn mower is just being a lawn mower. What’s really disturbing your meditation? Is it the lawn mower or is it your anger about the lawn mower, about the noise?

This doesn’t mean that we don’t work skillfully to control things in our lives that we can control. If we want it to be quiet and the gardener is mowing the lawn, we can ask him, “Can you go over there and mow for the next hour so I can have quiet?” Yes, that’s fine. But, if you can’t control it, if you find yourself wanting to meditate and you’re sitting by a busy street and there are cars and motorcycles driving past and you can’t stop the traffic, and you can’t go someplace else, you can simply make space for it. It’s your choice!

This extends into everything in our lives. You might have a sick parent who’s very demanding, afraid, and angry. You say to yourself, “She’s ruining my life. Everything was fine until she got sick.” You can’t get the sick parent better. What’s really disturbing your life, her being sick or your relationship with her being sick?

To me one big piece of what meditation is about is exploring our relationship with what comes up in our lives. As we do that, we start to see that our dissatisfaction in life comes much more from our relationship to what is and trying to change what can’t be changed, or trying to hold onto to something we can’t hold onto, than it comes from the things themselves.

If we want to be happy, if we don’t want to be unhappy, first we need to understand what is the source of our happiness and what is the source of our unhappiness. My experience is that much of what makes us unhappy is trying to change the way things are in places where we really can’t change them, or to hold onto things that we can’t hold onto. This is something that you can look at in meditation and really see in your own life.

There are many forms of meditation. Some are very strong concentration practices, where you fix your mind on an object such as a mantra or a candle flame, and keep your attention fixed to it. Through doing that you can move into a very blissful state. Thought temporarily subsides. But when you come out of that blissful state, whatever is disturbing you is still there. What are you going to do with it?

The meditation we’ll be doing uses concentration, but it’s a different kind of concentration. It’s a flowing, natural concentration that moves to whatever is predominant in our experience. We start with the breath as primary object most of the time. Some people who find the breath difficult can use the body or other things as primary object. Feeling the breath coming in at the nostrils and flowing out of the nostrils, or if for some reason it’s hard for you to breathe through your nose, you can feel the rise and fall of your abdomen. That’s a second choice. We directly experience the breath. So, it’s not the concept of the breath, it’s the direct experience of it.

People find that they can stay with it for three or four breaths and then mind goes off somewhere. It doesn’t stay put. We often use the analogy of training a puppy. You sit the puppy, and you say, “Sit, stay,” and the puppy sits. It looks at you with its big eyes, wags its tail, and gets up and wanders off. You simply bring it back very patiently, say, “Sit! Stay!” and slowly it learns to stay put a little bit better.

We’re not trying to make the mind stay fixed on the breath, though, but asking mind to stay with whatever is primary in our experience. This is important. I am going to repeat it. We are not trying to make our mind stay put on the breath. That’s just another kind of judgment like, “I must do this and then I’ll be good.” We don’t need any more judgments in our lives. We’re trying to ask ourselves to stay present with whatever is primary in our experience. When whatever has pulled our attention away from our breath changes or dissolves, we come back to the breath. If something else pulls our attention away, we move to that, stay with it as long as it’s primary and then come back to the breath. The breath becomes a kind of home, like a chair you can sit on.

An illustration that may help is this. If I was sitting in a chair and suddenly the telephone rang, I would go and answer the telephone, say what needed to be said, hang up the phone. That finished, I come back and sit on my chair. Then maybe the dryer beeps and I think, “Oh, I need to check the clothes in the dryer.” So, I go and check the clothes in the dryer. When that’s finished, I come back and sit in my chair.

Whatever is present in our experience we attend to, and as it’s no longer primary, we go back to the breath. This is the process I’m going to be teaching to you for the next three days. Today and tomorrow I will be teaching this meditation practice and Aaron will be talking to considerable depth about why we’re doing this practice. Thursday we’ll have a largely silent day of meditation, alternating meditation periods and time for question and answers for those who are attending.

Aaron calls us “angels in earth suits.” He says that we all have this angelic aspect, this divine essence of ourselves. You could call it the soul or pure spirit body. We’re here in our earth suits, these physical, mental, emotional bodies. The whole point of our incarnation is not to get away from the physical, emotional, and mental bodies, ending up in some blissful spirit state totally unrelated to the world. The purpose of our incarnation is to live our humanness with as much love, as much wisdom, and as much skill as we can. To do that, we have to be here. So, Aaron will be talking about that and I will be teaching you meditation. Let’s stretch and then we’ll begin.

(Stretch. Short break.)

I’m going to teach you a little bit of meditation now and we’re going to do some practice and then I’m going to give you to Aaron for him to talk for a while. We will also have time for some questions and answers and discussion. We have a nice size group, small enough to ask questions easily. If at any time you want to ask a question or don’t understand what I’ve said, please raise your hand, speak up. Hal will sign it to me. We have an interesting process going here. Not only two, but three languages, because Hal will use sign language to me. Although I do lip read, I can’t lip read at the distances in this room, so Hal will simply sign to me what you’re saying. If you don’t speak English well enough to ask your question, ask in Spanish. Hal is hooked into the translator, who will translate it for Hal, who will sign it to me. I love the whole communication process.

You’ve noticed that I’m sitting on a funny cushion. This is called a zafu There’s nothing fancy about it. It’s simply designed to make it comfortable to sit on the floor and give your body the proper support. If I were to sit without that cushion, my back would be curved. The cushion creates enough lift that it’s easy for me to sit with a straight back. I don’t want it to be ramrod straight, but relaxed-straight. Body soft and relaxed but the spine erect. If you want to sit on the floor, any object such as a cushion or folded blanket that will elevate the buttocks will help you have a comfortable, stable posture.

You can also kneel with a cushion between your legs, resting the buttocks lightly against it. Some people use kneeling benches which are low enough to kneel and high enough so the lower legs slide underneath.

This zafu is usually paired with a similarly fabricked cushion that provides comfort under your ankles. When I travel I bring this small folding cushion instead. I find this (demonstrating) a comfortable posture. It gives me three bases of support, my knees touching and my buttocks touching, so that I don’t wobble. Please note that I sit just on the front of the zafu, so it supports the buttocks and allows the pelvis to tilt in. This positioning aids straightness of the back. Don’t sit way back on the zafu or any cushion or your back will be more inclined to slump.

There’s no reason why you can’t meditate sitting in a chair, but I would ask you as much as possible to sit straight and on the front edge of the chair and not slump while you’re meditating. If you’re going to meditate in a chair at home I would like you to have a chair that’s straight, and put a small block of wood, or a book or something under the back legs, so that you have a slight slant forward like I have here, so that you end up sitting erect and not needing to lean back. The only part of your posture that really is important is the back. Ideally, we do not want you to be leaning against the back of the chair, but to be self-supporting, back relaxed, but not slumped.

Now, I’d like you to take your thumbs and put them under your jaw, near your ears. Lift, as if somebody were lifting your head up. Or take a hair from the top of your head and lift. Can you feel that pull?

Along your spine you have extensor muscles. They are muscles that many of us don’t use very much. They are the muscles that help our spines stay upright. At first if you’re trying to sit straight you may find yourself tired. Your back may hurt, because you’re using new muscles. Eventually they’ll get stronger and sitting straight and self-supported will be easier.

The reason for sitting straight is that there really is a flow of energy from the base of the spine to the crown of the head and a movement of energy through the seven energy points within the body called chakras-the base, the spleen, the solar plexus, the heart, throat, third eye, and crown. An energy does flow through those much better if you’re sitting straight than if you’re slumped.

Feet: however you’re comfortable. If you’re sitting in a chair, I’d suggest you rest your feet a bit apart and firmly on the floor. Legs are open, not crossed. Arms: however they are comfortable. You can rest them on your lap. A classic meditation posture is to put the left hand on top of the right hand with the thumbs touching. There is energy flow through the hands, so there is a reason for that, but you don’t need to sit that way. For those who move into very deep meditation practice, you may feel a difference with hands placed this way, but if you’re more comfortable with your hands on your knees, that’s fine.